The Tiny Scandals and Trials

[ti-amie]

Technically this is Tiny but really?! I mean WTF???

[patrick]

Ouch

[ponchi101]

Because, of course, black women and Latinas are so much more lenient of sex crimes than those tough white women that did not mind the president bragging about grabbing women by the P.
Makes a ton of (expletive) sense.

[ti-amie]

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Someone blew his cover. I'm guessing they got him out by arresting him so quickly.

Proud Boys leader once cooperated with FBI, informed on other suspects in 2012 fraud case


Proud Boys leader Henry “Enrique” Tarrio was arrested in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 4. (Allison Dinner/AP)

By
Devlin Barrett and
Matt Zapotosky
Jan. 27, 2021 at 7:26 p.m. EST

Proud Boys leader Henry “Enrique” Tarrio was once a prolific cooperator with FBI and local law enforcement in South Florida, according to court records from a 2012 fraud case in which he pleaded guilty to helping sell stolen goods.

Tarrio is under intense law enforcement scrutiny since the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, in which members of the Proud Boys have been charged with some of the most destructive and aggressive acts around the building, according to people familiar with the FBI’s ongoing investigation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the case.

The Proud Boys is a male chauvinist group with ties to white nationalism. Last year, President Donald Trump famously told the group to “stand back and stand by” when asked during a debate to condemn white supremacists and the Proud Boys in particular. The moment emboldened the group and others like it that viewed Trump’s comment as indicating that they had presidential support.

The Proud Boys have led numerous pro-Trump demonstrations, but since Jan. 6, Tarrio has called for a halt on participating in marches. Even before the riot, he was the subject of a law enforcement investigation and was arrested in early January for allegedly burning a Black Lives Matter banner torn down from a historic church during a previous rally in Washington. Tarrio has pleaded not guilty.

Tarrio, who has denied that the Proud Boys organized any violence at the Capitol, did not respond to a text message and phone call seeking comment about his past cooperation with law enforcement, which was first reported Wednesday by Reuters. He told the news service that he had no recollection of assisting law enforcement despite being identified in the court documents.

In a screed posted online later in the day, Tarrio criticized the government and the media for disclosing his past activities and argued that his cooperation was done with the full knowledge and participation of his co-defendants. Tarrio said in the post that by reporting the contents of a public court hearing, “they have proven that if you cooperate with the US government they will hang you out to dry... So my question is... is it worth it? That I leave up to y’all to decide.”

It is unclear how his record as a cooperator will be received by the members of his group, which proclaims to be pro-law enforcement, although its members have clashed openly with police officers in recent rallies, including at the Capitol.

At a 2014 hearing in his case, then-prosecutor Vanessa Johannes described Tarrio as “probably the most cooperative from day one. From day one, he was the one who wanted to talk to law enforcement, wanted to clear his name, wanted to straighten this out so that he could move on with his life.”

The prosecutor told the court that Tarrio’s cooperation helped federal agents prosecute 13 others and aided local police with a number of undercover drug investigations.

Jeffrey Feiler, Tarrio’s defense attorney at the time, said Tarrio’s broad cooperation allowed law enforcement to successfully raid multiple marijuana grow houses and seize 100 pounds of the drug. He said Tarrio also “worked in an undercover capacity in a case involving information pertaining to an illegal immigrant smuggling ring and, again at his own risk, in an undercover role met and negotiated to pay $11,000 to members of that ring to bring in fictitious family members of his from another country.”

The prosecutor, though, said nothing came of that case.

Feiler said that in addition to the cooperation Tarrio provided that produced indictments or other tangible results, Tarrio also made 10 attempts that did not ultimately work, sometimes because the local police department involved just did not have the manpower. Those cases involved steroids, cocaine, ecstasy and credit card theft, Feiler said.

At the 2014 hearing, Feiler argued that Tarrio’s cooperation had earned him a reduction of his prison sentence by 18 months, while the prosecutor argued for a 10-month cut. The judge ultimately reduced his sentence nearly in half, from 30 months to 16 months.

Feiler said in an interview with The Washington Post on Wednesday that he had limited memory of the case and was unsure whether Tarrio’s work with law enforcement extended further in any sort of paid or other capacity.

“Typically what will happen is a defendant or cooperator will run the gamut of everything they hope to accomplish, and then there will come a point where they’ve done all they can do,” Feiler said.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national ... story.html

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[Suliso]

‘The perfect target’: Russia cultivated Trump as asset for 40 years – ex-KGB spy

The KGB ‘played the game as if they were immensely impressed by his personality’, Yuri Shvets, a key source for a new book, tells the Guardian

Donald Trump was cultivated as a Russian asset over 40 years and proved so willing to parrot anti-western propaganda that there were celebrations in Moscow, a former KGB spy has told the Guardian.

Yuri Shvets, posted to Washington by the Soviet Union in the 1980s, compares the former US president to “the Cambridge five”, the British spy ring that passed secrets to Moscow during the second world war and early cold war.

Now 67, Shvets is a key source for American Kompromat, a new book by journalist Craig Unger, whose previous works include House of Trump, House of Putin. The book also explores the former president’s relationship with the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.

“This is an example where people were recruited when they were just students and then they rose to important positions; something like that was happening with Trump,” Shvets said by phone on Monday from his home in Virginia.

Shvets, a KGB major, had a cover job as a correspondent in Washington for the Russian news agency Tass during the 1980s. He moved to the US permanently in 1993 and gained American citizenship. He works as a corporate security investigator and was a partner of Alexander Litvinenko, who was assassinated in London in 2006.

Unger describes how Trump first appeared on the Russians’ radar in 1977 when he married his first wife, Ivana Zelnickova, a Czech model. Trump became the target of a spying operation overseen by Czechoslovakia’s intelligence service in cooperation with the KGB.

Three years later Trump opened his first big property development, the Grand Hyatt New York hotel near Grand Central station. Trump bought 200 television sets for the hotel from Semyon Kislin, a Soviet émigré who co-owned Joy-Lud electronics on Fifth Avenue.

According to Shvets, Joy-Lud was controlled by the KGB and Kislin worked as a so-called “spotter agent” who identified Trump, a young businessman on the rise, as a potential asset. Kislin denies that he had a relationship with the KGB.

Then, in 1987, Trump and Ivana visited Moscow and St Petersburg for the first time. Shvets said he was fed by KGB talking points and flattered by KGB operatives who floated the idea that he should go into the politics.

The ex-major recalled: “For the KGB, it was a charm offensive. They had collected a lot of information on his personality so they knew who he was personally. The feeling was that he was extremely vulnerable intellectually, and psychologically, and he was prone to flattery.

“This is what they exploited. They played the game as if they were immensely impressed by his personality and believed this is the guy who should be the president of the United States one day: it is people like him who could change the world. They fed him these so-called active measures soundbites and it happened. So it was a big achievement for the KGB active measures at the time.”

Soon after he returned to the US, Trump began exploring a run for the Republican nomination for president and even held a campaign rally in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. On 1 September, he took out a full-page advert in the New York Times, Washington Post and Boston Globe headlined: “There’s nothing wrong with America’s Foreign Defense Policy that a little backbone can’t cure.”

The ad offered some highly unorthodox opinions in Ronald Reagan’s cold war America, accusing ally Japan of exploiting the US and expressing scepticism about US participation in Nato. It took the form of an open letter to the American people “on why America should stop paying to defend countries that can afford to defend themselves”.

The bizarre intervention was cause for astonishment and jubilation in Russia. A few days later Shvets, who had returned home by now, was at the headquarters of the KGB’s first chief directorate in Yasenevo when he received a cable celebrating the ad as a successful “active measure” executed by a new KGB asset.

“It was unprecedented. I am pretty well familiar with KGB active measures starting in the early 70s and 80s, and then afterwards with Russia active measures, and I haven’t heard anything like that or anything similar – until Trump became the president of this country – because it was just silly. It was hard to believe that somebody would publish it under his name and that it will impress real serious people in the west but it did and, finally, this guy became the president.”

Trump’s election win in 2016 was again welcomed by Moscow. Special counsel Robert Mueller did not establish a conspiracy between members of the Trump campaign and the Russians. But the Moscow Project, an initiative of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, found the Trump campaign and transition team had at least 272 known contacts and at least 38 known meetings with Russia-linked operatives.

Shvets, who has carried out his own investigation, said: “For me, the Mueller report was a big disappointment because people expected that it will be a thorough investigation of all ties between Trump and Moscow, when in fact what we got was an investigation of just crime-related issues. There were no counterintelligence aspects of the relationship between Trump and Moscow.”

He added: “This is what basically we decided to correct. So I did my investigation and then got together with Craig. So we believe that his book will pick up where Mueller left off.”

Unger, the author of seven books and a former contributing editor for Vanity Fair magazine, said of Trump: “He was an asset. It was not this grand, ingenious plan that we’re going to develop this guy and 40 years later he’ll be president. At the time it started, which was around 1980, the Russians were trying to recruit like crazy and going after dozens and dozens of people.”

“Trump was the perfect target in a lot of ways: his vanity, narcissism made him a natural target to recruit. He was cultivated over a 40-year period, right up through his election.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... y-new-book

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[the Moz]

Basket of deplorables

[ponchi101]

Serious question. If these people wrote stuff like that and posted it, and then DID go to congress, and DID break in, what kind of charges can be brought on them? Attempted magnicide?

[ti-amie]

The woman above sent the clip to her kids per reporting by Chris Hayes. Then she tried to delete it.

[ti-amie]

Trump Defense Secretary Disarmed D.C. National Guard Before Capitol Riot
Mark Sumner

Reprinted with permission from DailyKos

In testimony before the House this week, Capitol Police and D.C. National Guard officials acknowledged that by Jan. 4 they understood that "… the January 6th event would not be like any of the previous protests held in 2020. We knew that militia groups and white supremacist organizations would be attending. We also knew that some of these participants were intending to bring firearms and other weapons to the event. We knew that there was a strong potential for violence and that Congress was the target."

On that same day, former acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller issued a memo to the secretary of the Army placing some extremely unusual limits on National Guard forces for that event. It's not a to-do list. It's a list of thou shalt nots. A long list. A list that says guard forces can't arrest any of the pro-Trump protesters, or search them, or even touch them. And that's just for starters.

The full memo shows that the D.C. Guard did receive a request from D.C. government for guard presence during the Jan. 6 event. Miller responds promptly to go ahead, so long as the soldiers are given no weapons, no body armor, and no helmets. They can bring agents like pepper spray or flashbangs. They can't share any gear with Capitol Police or Metro D.C. Police. They can't … really do much of anything.

When initial reports indicate that the handful of National Guard forces that were deployed to D.C. on that day were dedicated to directing traffic several blocks away from the area of the Trump rally, it may simply be because that's the only thing they could find for them to do considering the restrictions that were given. It's clear that these restrictions would have absolutely prevented any guard forces from trying to protect any location.



Letter from form acting secretary of defense giving Jan.6 limits on National Guard

In addition to this memo, another grim document of the Jan. 6 insurgency emerged on Thursday. As The New York Times reports, body cam footage (deliberately not inserted here) from officers on the Capitol steps was used in court when bringing charges against Michael Foy, a Michigan man who attacked the police with a hockey stick. In addition to Foy's attack, the minute of video captures a grisly scene—the moment when 34-year-old Rosanne Boyland is trampled to death on the Capitol steps by fellow insurgents rushing forward to join the attack on police.

At least one person in the crowd notices what is happening and shouts "Save her!" But the wave of insurgents battering at police with flagpoles and lengths of pipe never pauses. Only seconds later, Boyland's friend Justin Winchell shouts "She's gonna die! She's dead!" He attempts to get help from those around him, but what he gets is a face full of chemical agent that rioters behind him are aiming at the police. Boyland's death is far from the only moment of shocking violence in the video, as insurgents scream that they will kill the police, and officers are toppled and dragged down the stairs. By the end of the brief video, the police are down, as the Trump supporters kick them and beat them over and over. The wonder isn't that someone died. It's that it wasn't more.

Considering the limits that Miller set on National Guard forces—including no helmet and no body armor—it's a good thing that none of them were present at the Capitol. They would not have survived.

https://www.nationalmemo.com/miller-dis ... onal-guard